141. Richard Kreitner — Break it Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union

<p>The provocative thesis of <em><a href= "https://www.amazon.com/dp/0316510602/?tag=skepticcom20-20">Break It Up</a></em> is simple: The United States has never lived up to its name—and never will. The disunionist impulse may have found its greatest expression in the Civil War, but as <em>Break It Up</em> shows, the seduction of secession wasn’t limited to the South or the 19^thcentury. It was there at our founding and has never gone away.</p> <p>Investigative journalist Richard Kreitner takes readers on a revolutionary journey through American history, revealing the power and persistence of disunion movements in every era and region. Each New England town after Plymouth was a secession from another; the 13 colonies viewed their Union as a means to the end of securing independence, not an end in itself; George Washington feared separatism west of the Alleghenies; Aaron Burr schemed to set up a new empire; John Quincy Adams brought a Massachusetts town’s petition for dissolving the United States to the floor of Congress; and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison denounced the Constitution as a pro-slavery pact with the devil.</p> <p>From the “cold civil war” that pits partisans against one another to the modern secession movements in California and Texas, the divisions that threaten to tear America apart today have centuries-old roots in the earliest days of our Republic. Richly researched and persuasively argued, <em>Break It Up</em> will help readers make fresh sense of our fractured age. Shermer and Kreitner discuss:</p> <ul> <li>what happens if Trump loses the 2020 election and refuses to leave,</li> <li>the possibility of the secession of California, Oregon and Washington,</li> <li>States rights vs. Federal power in issues like climate change, abortion, health care, etc.,</li> <li>how Native American tribes and nations governed themselves and what the colonists learned from them,</li> <li>how the 1^st colonial revolution was fought not to create a federation but to destroy one when Boston r